Daily Inspiration Quote by Mark Goddard

There is a quiet sting in Goddard's phrasing: not heartbreak, but bureaucratic disappointment. "I was supposed to have a relationship with Judy" sounds like romance reduced to a production memo, intimacy treated as a scheduling note that simply "never happened". The line exposes how classic TV often operated less like a collaborative art form and more like an assembly line, where character arcs were assigned, revised, or dropped with little regard for the performers asked to sell them.

The real bite comes in the second sentence, which turns personal anecdote into labor history. Goddard isn't just reminiscing about a plot that got scrapped; he's marking a shift in power. In the era he’s describing, series actors were famously interchangeable parts: hired to deliver lines, not to shape narrative. The subtext is a kind of professional infantilization - actors as employees expected to comply, even when story choices made their characters thinner, stranger, or inconsistent.

It also reads as a corrective to today's mythology of television as a writers-and-actors utopia. We now associate prestige TV with showrunner transparency, actor-producer hybrids, and stars who can negotiate character direction, intimacy coordination, even episode order. Goddard reminds you that this is new, and contingent: control is something workers win, not something art naturally grants. The offhand tone is doing the work here. He doesn’t rage; he documents. That restraint makes the critique sharper, because it implies the system was so normal no one even expected an explanation.